Glad you got some money back, anyway. I didn't have any major problems; but I'm not doing HD, and I hear stability has really improved recently so my experience was probably not as harrowing as that of the early adopters.
Weirdly enough, I don't even watch TV... I built the box for the rest of the family after we were at a friends' house and saw his. I guess I had the advantage of knowing exactly what capture card to buy, too (hauppage).
On the KB, you have to hit enter after you've found the channel you want (I didn't figure that out, my kid showed me).
But that should not be needed on the remote so I'm afraid I'm just as puzzled as you are... p'raps you should look here. If you are outside the USA apparently there's some special mojo involved.
Frustrating is an understatement. I can't even get myth to change channels! My 10-year-old showed me how to do that from the keyboard, and since then I haven't bothered with the remote... I like to switch back and forth between the web and TV so I have a keyboard on my lap anyway.
As recall from my former life as a rocket scientist, he did the design math for the Pathfinder Mars lander's airbag; supposedly on the back of a napkin, according to my former cow-orkers. It worked fine after a two-year trip through space. Seriously... he totally pwned the Mars Curse.
Of course, he's retired now, but he's still pretty sharp... I heard him flaming people 30 years younger than he is at a city council meeting last year.
You might want to look up the original line in Franklin's Historical Review of Pennsylvania since you are sitting at a computer and the text's available online.
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." - Thomas Jefferson
Are you convinced that it's that simple, that they can dynamically stamp out every worm/virus/trojan/spammer as it pops up without accidentally dropping even one legitimate packet? Yes, for the first three. I've even done it, on corporate networks. I've even told Comcast support that I would train them how to do it, for free. Some spammers are harder - the human-driven spam, where a person types up the spam and sends it to a handmade list of less than a hundred people, is difficult to differentiate from valid mail. Hardcore spammers are based on botnets (fluxnets or zombies if you prefer) of machines that were backdoored by worms, so they get handled when the worms are eradicated.
I'd need the existing hardware infrastructure of Comcast, a few cheap PCs, a set of free software tools plus about 20 hours for glue code. Call it a week, once the will to get it done exists. Hint, if you don't understand how this is possible: Read the DNS RFCs and study the DOCSIS2 spec.
Are you also aware that your suggestion is not unique in any way, and has been peddled as an answer to every ISP out there that carries substantial traffic? Um, if you mean have I been saying this for years in many public forums, yes I'm aware of that. Other people who have equal or better understanding of the problem can see the obvious solutions as well as I can, I'm sure.
I am also obliged to point out some of the larger trite counterpoints, such as increased cost for doing the filtering, customers complaining that now the ISP is being a big brother, is the ISP even responsible, etc. etc. Not a problem. ISPs only have to take action against customers generating traffic that is in violation of their customer service agreement (and only a subset of the currently prohibited traffic, in fact) and they have enough existing processing power to do so at this time. If they do it right, they can provide a profitable and useful service to the infected customers that they will be grateful for - "hey, you've got a worm, here's a web site that the antivirus vendors pay Comcast to be on; choose your vendor and disinfect yourself".
In real life, there is no added cost whatsoever to managing a network correctly except salaries, and the payback for hiring competent people will far exceed the outlay.
This has already been played out. Yes, it's been played out a million times in large corporate and campus networks all over the world. I deal with hundreds of networks that do not have the problems Comcast has and do not have the fiscal resources or hardware infrastructure Comcast has - yet, they do a better job than Comcast at differentiating legitimate traffic from malicious traffic. My own network has been up for 10 years without a single spam, virus or worm exiting my systems - it's not impossible for PROFESSIONALS (i.e., the people Comcast refuses to hire because they are too shortsightedly greedy to pay them) to do this.
I've used comcast (previously known as AT&T) since 1997 as a home customer, and I've never "installed" anything. I have never used their portal. Me too. I regularly lie to them about this since they've made it clear that they will not support any intelligently designed home network infrastructure - if I mention my squid or mythtv installations they go tharn.
Why would you? I don't know, maybe because they tell you to, and not every one of their customers is a computer professional?
What would be the point? You follow the rules with your electric, phone and natural gas service, right? Why shouldn't you follow the rules for the Internet service? Oh, because you have specialist knowledge that 99% of the human race doesn't have. But you know, professional electricians follow the NEC2005, and professsional plumbers follow the UBC, because those instructions actually have some semblance of validity - unlike Comcast's instructions and stated requirements.
I subscribe to them because they are simply my connection to the outside world, and they are (in my case) *very* reliable and *very* fast. Well, lucky you. Comcast's service in my area is neither of those two things, it's not even *slightly* reliable and it's so worm-loaded that the speed suffers too.
All you have to do is plug your router into their modem, and turn on DHCP. <sarcasm>oooo. Yeah, that's hard.</sarcasm> We're all very impressed that you know how to connect wires and you have a reasonable familiarity with DOD-stack host configuration protocols. Most people here have that knowledge too.
Comcast is a worm farm and they refuse to listen to their customers when those same customers tell them how to fix their service and make more money at the same time. Their greed and incompetence are indefensible; their shareholders should roust out the current management and put in somebody with some bare minimum of technical competence. They'd make tons more profit if they killed off the malware that generates over half their packet traffic, and they could allow people to run private servers with the released bandwidth, which would make their service better.
This number ignores WWII related deaths! As it should. But, have you compared Bush to Stalin over time? According to the Arab press, Bush has already beaten Saddam Hussein for bloodyhandedness - once you adjust the figures for relative time in power. Stalin was in power for decades, and Bush only has eight years to get his slaughtering done. If you divide both by the days in office, what happens to the numbers then? How does Bush score on a level playing field?
There's no such thing as an "inappropriate" comparison. The results of the process of comparing two things reveals the level of resemblance between them - which might be zero, of course, but that's still a comparison. Granted, either you compare things fairly or you don't. The oft-repeated mantra "you can't compare Bush to Hitler" is bullshit, though - I can compare fish to the Dirac Sea if I want to.
most people probably associate Einstein with the bomb, even though he had nothing to with the Manhattan Engineer District and nothing to do with the larger concept of atomic weapons besides lending his name and fame to a letter urging research into them. I think you're probably right. In reality Leo Szilard invented both the nuclear reactor and the bomb. Szilard consulted Einstein as to the feasibility of the device, and as you correctly noted he also got Einstein to co-author a letter to Roosevelt. Because Einstein was considered insufficiently trustworthy (and far too Jewish) by Hoover and other influential US apparatchiks, he was not officially part of the Manhattan project, though supposedly he was secretly kept "in the loop" by Szilard and other scientists... perhaps an urban legend.
The original post contains great unintentional humor, since Oppenheimer didn't invent the bomb, and Gatling didn't invent the machine gun. Practically nobody knows about Szilard (Hungarian) or Puckle (British). And there are lots of gun experts who don't consider either the Gatling or the Puckle (or the Milletreuse) to be "true" machine guns anyway, but that's a whole 'nother pointless debate.
A: an improved version of the Puckle gun (the first machine gun, invented 1718). The Gatling gun, invented in the 1860s, incorporates the same improvements in technology that other guns did over the same century and a half - better machining, true rifling (which is even better than square bullets) and of course the elimination of the flintlock in favor of percussion caps. It keeps the multiple barrels and crank of the Puckle gun but has a phenomenally higher rate of fire, especially when it was redesigned for metallic cartridges after the War Between the States. The Gatling gun was intended to be a terror weapon, though, so it doesn't have the roguish charm of the Puckle gun ("round bullets for use against Christians, and square bullets for use against Turks").
Q: "What did Mr. Oppenheimer invent?"
A: an organizational method that simultaneously satisfied the needs of goal-driven military hierarchs and curiosity-driven scientists and eventually produced two different atomic bombs (atomic bombs, of course, were invented by Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard in the 1930s - he filed a British patent application for the atomic bomb in 1934). Today we call this method "herding cats".
I really doubt most people know this stuff. People around here smoke dope while skiing naked, y'know...:)
I read somewhere that the old DEC VT100 (or was it the VT220?) had instructions in the manual that said something like "put them in the dishwasher to clean up".
I spent a few decades on the VT100 (used the VT52 before that, too... the MASS11 ones had a "gold" key that was actually gold. Gold-colored, anyway.) and I don't remember that being in the manual.
Of course, that's what I did when I needed to clean one, but that's what I do with PC keyboards now. Works fine on most of them, just don't use heated dry or detergent and make sure it's fully dried before using (I just shake 'em and wait a week or so for the water to dry out).
This is the ENTIRE TERMINAL, not just the keyboard.
That would be pretty difficult. I don't think you realize how big that device was (and the vibration would probably hose the CRT up pretty badly in any case). The VT100 had a detached keyboard, though, unlike the VT52.
We had an overhead hydraulic line bust in the Thrust Vector Control lab and one of the VT100s filled up entirely with hydraulic fluid. Really, it was entirely full, and sitting in a big puddle of overflow. We just poured the oil out, rinsed briefly with alcohol, cleaned the contacts, and used it for another five or six years at least. It smelled funny once it warmed up, though, and the keyboard eventually gummed up after a few years.
AOL's in a touchy position - they really do receive infinite quantities of spam, and it's hard to tell some kinds of spam from legitimate mail without having humans read it, and it's hard to tell legitimate senders asking to be reinstated from spammers asking to be reinstated, and the financial incentives for allowing good email aren't very high so they can't afford to put lots of humans into the loop. But their reputation is such that lots of mail senders are simply not willing to deal with them. AOL has consistently refused to build an RFC-compliant email system. The RFCs require maintenance of a postmaster address that is not an auto-responder, but an actual human postmaster. This is a very important feature of SMTP and it's simply not optional. If they can't do it, they need to stop offering email to their clients. We don't let butchers sell tainted meat because they can't afford a refrigerator, we tell the butchers to solve their own problems and stop poisoning the public. Why should anyone let AOL get away with their excuse of "oh, that's too hard and we couldn't make a profit if we employed human postmasters"? There are other ISPs who would flourish if bottom-feeders like AOL weren't totally distorting the marketplace with their broken services that effectively push AOL's costs onto others.
AOL used to be listed at RFC-ignorant, for perfectly valid reasons, but I guess they must have bullied the owners of that site into submission. They are still not doing real Internet email (i.e. RFC-compliant SMTP) and they have no intention of ever doing so, by their own admission. The ultimate arrogance is AOL's insistence (touched on in the grandparent post) that other spam generators (yes AOL still generates huge amounts of spam, though they are slowly getting that problem under control) must maintain valid postmaster boxes.
Hopefully DKIM will eventually solve all this for us. Don't hold your breath, though.
Can you give brand-new interns commit access to your core system? Well, theoretically, yes. Because theoretically you have code review and regression testing and auditing and the ability to revert to any point in the development process, and because theoretically you only hire incredibly competent folks who will only recruit marvelously talented interns.
Of course, in theory, there's no meaningful difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is.
That gyrojet is pretty cool (tech-wise, not death-wise). I've read stories where some agent uses such a weapon, but I didn't know there had been a real one. That link doesn't go into great detail, but the projectile seems to BE rocket powered, rather than a miniatureized reccoilless gun. Yup, as I recall the bullets have four pinhole nozzles set at angles to create spin... they continue to accelerate after leaving the barrel. The eponymous gyrojet pistol had a relatively flimsy vented launch pipe instead of a heavy, finely machined barrel. It's very expensive to get rounds for them nowadays.
How do you live in this web2.0 world? Seriously. The OP is probably one of the clueful group of people who run firefox with noscript - a firefox add-on that helps prevent crime2.1.
Are you seriously running around with Javascript turned on all the time?
There is an upper limit whereby body armor would remain intact, while the flesh beneath is reduced to a pulp. That limit's hackable.
Though admittedly conservation of momentum also applies to the shooter, and to the recoil of their gun, so there is a similar upper limit for muzzle velocity per unit of projectile mass. That one is too.
Similarly, if the AC is on the high current draw of the blower and the mechanical load of the compressor will cause the motor to run in situations where it would otherwise cut out; this is more than compensated for at highway speeds, when you've got lots of available power, but it kicks your mpg pretty hard in stop-an-go traffic situations where the system would normally shine.
so in Fl where I run the AC 10 months a year I am not likly to get better milage with a highbreed if I drive in a lot of stop and go traffic? You will get better mileage than you would in a non-hybrid, but you will not get the EPA rated mileage. You also won't get the EPA rated mileage in a non-hybrid, of course. With either type of car, stop-an-go traffic with the AC on will definitely punish your mileage, simply because it takes more energy (and thus more gas) to run the compressor and blower that maintain the forced draft of cold air inside the car. But yeah, I think you've got pretty close to the worst case scenario there. The hybrid will not be able to shut down the internal combustion engine very often, and total ICE shutdown is your big gas saver.
It's also kind of funny how much the weather affects my MPG. Cold weather drops me down at least 5 MPG. I'm not sure if that's particular to hybrids, or if that's every car. All cars perform differently under extremely different weather conditions - some cars get better MPG in the rain (Maybelline! Why can't you be true?).
My Prius has to "warm up" longer to get to operating temps in the winter; since the drive train contains many different materials with differing coefficients of heat expansion, the engine controller wants to reach the optimum operating temperature before doing those near-instantaneous engine cut-ins and cut-outs. This is noticeably reflected in miles per gallon.
Similarly, if the AC is on the high current draw of the blower and the mechanical load of the compressor will cause the motor to run in situations where it would otherwise cut out; this is more than compensated for at highway speeds, when you've got lots of available power, but it kicks your mpg pretty hard in stop-an-go traffic situations where the system would normally shine.
I get around 47 mpg in my 2002 Prius, but real world mileage will always be highly dependent on your driving requirements (city, highway, congestion, run time, other factors). I'm sure I'd get high in the 50s in a modern Prius, because my working commute is pretty optimal for a hybrid system.
I think it's funny that the ratings (which were never believed by anyone with an ounce of sense) are getting modified to counter the rating-whoring of hybrids. If you look at what the rating authority did, they basically dropped part of the idling requirement - does this mean Americans are spending less time idling their engines? Seems to me the opposite is true!
Tell me what your point is if it's not simply trolling. Tivo isn't "better" than other VRs - for my purposes, it's significantly more expensive, especially over time - so your original comment (decrying people's championing of tivo alternatives) seemed like the pot calling the kettle black.
But no, I'm not really a troll. Just a curmudgeon:) it can be hard to tell the difference sometimes.
Oh, here we go with another person that has no clue what they're talking about saying that Sage and Myth are better than / cheaper than / equivalent to a TiVo. What, you've had all three? How did you get to be an expert?
Here's the deal. The only HD content you can get with MythTV and SageTV are unencrypted broadcasts. For 99% of people that means whatever they can get OTA by antenna (or those same channels re-broadcast by their cable company). Yes, all 10 people in the entire world who can get every channel from the firewire port of their unhacked cable box will respond to this comment saying that they get everything, but that's all of them. Everybody else in the US can only get CBS, ABC, NBC, PBS, and Fox in HD on their non-TiVo DVR. Well, that's not something I actually care about, personally, but: my mythTV can record anything my television can display, and everything I am paying the cable company for. So what's your point? That Tivo does stuff I don't need, and therefore it's better?
Not only that, but a TiVo (especially the ones with the built in DVD recorders) already does everything that the average user cares about. Having the content stored without encryption on the hard drive is something that wouldn't change the user experience one bit for most users; even advanced users. Uh, aren't you undermining your own argument? You were just trumpeting things the average user doesn't care about, because the average user hasn't got HD capability. Hell, the mythical "average" user probably only watches FOX or American Idol anyway.
Tivo's become another cult, it seems. MythTV does everthing that my spouse and children care about, and I don't watch TV anyway.
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The whole episode "Cave Dwellers" is PRICELESS. Highly recommended!
"Who is this gentle stranger with pecs like melons and knees of fringe?"
But wait, there's also the song from Fugitive Alien, "He tried to kill me with a fork lift".
Glad you got some money back, anyway. I didn't have any major problems; but I'm not doing HD, and I hear stability has really improved recently so my experience was probably not as harrowing as that of the early adopters.
Weirdly enough, I don't even watch TV... I built the box for the rest of the family after we were at a friends' house and saw his. I guess I had the advantage of knowing exactly what capture card to buy, too (hauppage).
On the KB, you have to hit enter after you've found the channel you want (I didn't figure that out, my kid showed me).
But that should not be needed on the remote so I'm afraid I'm just as puzzled as you are... p'raps you should look here. If you are outside the USA apparently there's some special mojo involved.
Sorry, buying a Tivo is not as much fun as building a MythTV box from scratch.
Not as frustrating, either, I suppose, but these things often go hand in hand.
As recall from my former life as a rocket scientist, he did the design math for the Pathfinder Mars lander's airbag; supposedly on the back of a napkin, according to my former cow-orkers. It worked fine after a two-year trip through space. Seriously... he totally pwned the Mars Curse.
Of course, he's retired now, but he's still pretty sharp... I heard him flaming people 30 years younger than he is at a city council meeting last year.
You might want to look up the original line in Franklin's Historical Review of Pennsylvania since you are sitting at a computer and the text's available online.
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." - Thomas Jefferson
I'd need the existing hardware infrastructure of Comcast, a few cheap PCs, a set of free software tools plus about 20 hours for glue code. Call it a week, once the will to get it done exists. Hint, if you don't understand how this is possible: Read the DNS RFCs and study the DOCSIS2 spec. Are you also aware that your suggestion is not unique in any way, and has been peddled as an answer to every ISP out there that carries substantial traffic? Um, if you mean have I been saying this for years in many public forums, yes I'm aware of that. Other people who have equal or better understanding of the problem can see the obvious solutions as well as I can, I'm sure. I am also obliged to point out some of the larger trite counterpoints, such as increased cost for doing the filtering, customers complaining that now the ISP is being a big brother, is the ISP even responsible, etc. etc. Not a problem. ISPs only have to take action against customers generating traffic that is in violation of their customer service agreement (and only a subset of the currently prohibited traffic, in fact) and they have enough existing processing power to do so at this time. If they do it right, they can provide a profitable and useful service to the infected customers that they will be grateful for - "hey, you've got a worm, here's a web site that the antivirus vendors pay Comcast to be on; choose your vendor and disinfect yourself".
In real life, there is no added cost whatsoever to managing a network correctly except salaries, and the payback for hiring competent people will far exceed the outlay. This has already been played out. Yes, it's been played out a million times in large corporate and campus networks all over the world. I deal with hundreds of networks that do not have the problems Comcast has and do not have the fiscal resources or hardware infrastructure Comcast has - yet, they do a better job than Comcast at differentiating legitimate traffic from malicious traffic. My own network has been up for 10 years without a single spam, virus or worm exiting my systems - it's not impossible for PROFESSIONALS (i.e., the people Comcast refuses to hire because they are too shortsightedly greedy to pay them) to do this.
Comcast is a worm farm and they refuse to listen to their customers when those same customers tell them how to fix their service and make more money at the same time. Their greed and incompetence are indefensible; their shareholders should roust out the current management and put in somebody with some bare minimum of technical competence. They'd make tons more profit if they killed off the malware that generates over half their packet traffic, and they could allow people to run private servers with the released bandwidth, which would make their service better.
There's no such thing as an "inappropriate" comparison. The results of the process of comparing two things reveals the level of resemblance between them - which might be zero, of course, but that's still a comparison. Granted, either you compare things fairly or you don't. The oft-repeated mantra "you can't compare Bush to Hitler" is bullshit, though - I can compare fish to the Dirac Sea if I want to.
As soon as the ball team finds out they can wreck their exams with a coat hanger and a microwave, you can count on it happening every finals week.
See, you have an opportunity to educate here, and isn't that what college is all about?
The original post contains great unintentional humor, since Oppenheimer didn't invent the bomb, and Gatling didn't invent the machine gun. Practically nobody knows about Szilard (Hungarian) or Puckle (British). And there are lots of gun experts who don't consider either the Gatling or the Puckle (or the Milletreuse) to be "true" machine guns anyway, but that's a whole 'nother pointless debate.
Q: "What did Mr. Gatling invent?"
:)
A: an improved version of the Puckle gun (the first machine gun, invented 1718). The Gatling gun, invented in the 1860s, incorporates the same improvements in technology that other guns did over the same century and a half - better machining, true rifling (which is even better than square bullets) and of course the elimination of the flintlock in favor of percussion caps. It keeps the multiple barrels and crank of the Puckle gun but has a phenomenally higher rate of fire, especially when it was redesigned for metallic cartridges after the War Between the States. The Gatling gun was intended to be a terror weapon, though, so it doesn't have the roguish charm of the Puckle gun ("round bullets for use against Christians, and square bullets for use against Turks").
Q: "What did Mr. Oppenheimer invent?"
A: an organizational method that simultaneously satisfied the needs of goal-driven military hierarchs and curiosity-driven scientists and eventually produced two different atomic bombs (atomic bombs, of course, were invented by Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard in the 1930s - he filed a British patent application for the atomic bomb in 1934). Today we call this method "herding cats".
I really doubt most people know this stuff. People around here smoke dope while skiing naked, y'know...
Of course, that's what I did when I needed to clean one, but that's what I do with PC keyboards now. Works fine on most of them, just don't use heated dry or detergent and make sure it's fully dried before using (I just shake 'em and wait a week or so for the water to dry out).That would be pretty difficult. I don't think you realize how big that device was (and the vibration would probably hose the CRT up pretty badly in any case). The VT100 had a detached keyboard, though, unlike the VT52.
We had an overhead hydraulic line bust in the Thrust Vector Control lab and one of the VT100s filled up entirely with hydraulic fluid. Really, it was entirely full, and sitting in a big puddle of overflow. We just poured the oil out, rinsed briefly with alcohol, cleaned the contacts, and used it for another five or six years at least. It smelled funny once it warmed up, though, and the keyboard eventually gummed up after a few years.
AOL used to be listed at RFC-ignorant, for perfectly valid reasons, but I guess they must have bullied the owners of that site into submission. They are still not doing real Internet email (i.e. RFC-compliant SMTP) and they have no intention of ever doing so, by their own admission. The ultimate arrogance is AOL's insistence (touched on in the grandparent post) that other spam generators (yes AOL still generates huge amounts of spam, though they are slowly getting that problem under control) must maintain valid postmaster boxes.
Hopefully DKIM will eventually solve all this for us. Don't hold your breath, though.
Of course, in theory, there's no meaningful difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is.
So I told him, "get a job, you hippy!"
Are you seriously running around with Javascript turned on all the time?
My Prius has to "warm up" longer to get to operating temps in the winter; since the drive train contains many different materials with differing coefficients of heat expansion, the engine controller wants to reach the optimum operating temperature before doing those near-instantaneous engine cut-ins and cut-outs. This is noticeably reflected in miles per gallon.
Similarly, if the AC is on the high current draw of the blower and the mechanical load of the compressor will cause the motor to run in situations where it would otherwise cut out; this is more than compensated for at highway speeds, when you've got lots of available power, but it kicks your mpg pretty hard in stop-an-go traffic situations where the system would normally shine.
I get around 47 mpg in my 2002 Prius, but real world mileage will always be highly dependent on your driving requirements (city, highway, congestion, run time, other factors). I'm sure I'd get high in the 50s in a modern Prius, because my working commute is pretty optimal for a hybrid system.
I think it's funny that the ratings (which were never believed by anyone with an ounce of sense) are getting modified to counter the rating-whoring of hybrids. If you look at what the rating authority did, they basically dropped part of the idling requirement - does this mean Americans are spending less time idling their engines? Seems to me the opposite is true!
But no, I'm not really a troll. Just a curmudgeon
Tivo's become another cult, it seems. MythTV does everthing that my spouse and children care about, and I don't watch TV anyway.